Desperate for LinkedIn connections

By Luther Martin — April 20, 2010

Some people out there seem to be extremely desperate for LinkedIn connections. I say this because lots of the Voltage email addresses that don't actually correspond to a real person (sales@voltage.com, etc.) are now getting requests to connect on LinkedIn. But because Sales (maybe it's actually Mr. Sales) doesn't actually know any of these people, Sales isn't accepting their requests to connect.

Maybe that's not such a good idea. If we had Sales sign up to LinkedIn, maybe they could leave annoying recommendations for people there. That might be fun.

I think part of this is also the LinkedIn sign-up process. Much like Facebook, part of their auto-setup script is to log in to Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail and look for those in your address book. They try and make those already in LinkedIn slightly difficult to distinguish from those not in LinkedIn. When the user clicks “Next” or just blindly clicks through the setup, it will send requests to those already on LinkedIn and spam the others in their address book. It can be fairly annoying.

Everything you say is correct, Eric. But it is even slightly worse than that. *Even if* you select only email addresses marked as already having LinkedIn accounts (or at the very least, are real people), if you are not very careful, LinkedIn will *trick* you into sending to all your harvested email addresses? How? After you click the SEND button, in an eyeblink, as part of the POSTDATA, they automatically RE-populate the invite list with all the addresses you just deliberately chose NOT to invite. Very sleazy (http://mondegreen2.blogspot.com/2009/05/very-sleazy-functionality-from-linkedin.html)